in galut, in cherem, in america (Ars Paradoxica)
by sir-hugalot
Summary: Esther Roberts will always be a Jew because there will always be someone to remind her she is a Jew. [minor spoilers for episode 13]


galut (גלות) = exile, diaspora  
cherem (חרם) = religious excommunication

i.  
When Etty Roberts was little, she dreamt of going to Harvard.

She was going to be a scientist. She would be a scientist at Harvard and she would be the son her parents never had (they never mentioned that they wanted one, but she knew; it was impossible to be the oldest of three girls and not know that her parents dreamt of a _bris_ , of a _bar mitzvah_ , of a son to say _kaddish_ ).

She did not go to Harvard.

She was told to direct her inquiries to women's colleges. Her father, attacking the brisket on his plate as though it were responsible for denying his oldest daughter the best possible education, said it would have been no better had she been a man: no good universities accepted Jews any more. When she had filled out her application, it had asked for a photograph; it had asked for her mother's maiden name; it had asked for details of any changes in her family surname. It had asked for her religion, too, but that could be explained away: perhaps they wanted that information to ensure they had adequate provisions for religious services, or hired enough rabbis, or-

ii.  
Etty Roberts went to NYU. A month before she started, Adolf Hitler became _Führer_.

iii.  
She had barely begun her second year of study when she returned home to find her parents silently listening to the wireless, their faces drawn. They had never taught her Yiddish, or even spoken it at home, so Etty allowed her mother to fold her into her arms and whisper, _oh, Etushka, what will happen now_ , before she asked what they had heard.

They had cousins in Germany. Everyone she knew had cousins in Germany.

When she sought escape in Bridgette's arms rather than face the air of heaviness and fear and defeat at home, she refused to talk to her, knowing she would mention what they had all heard on the wireless. Bridgette, too, had cousins in Germany. They all had cousins in Germany. Etty pressed her lips to the skin of her collarbone, of her breasts, of her thighs, rather than speak of Nuremberg in this moment of warmth, of bare limbs and soft skin.

iv.  
The first time Etty received an academic prize, three of her classmates followed her home, forcing her into an alley before spitting on her, accompanying kicks to her stomach with _kike_ and _filthy Jewess_. She had stolen the prize, they claimed; she had stolen it just as the Jews had stolen America's future by corrupting this good Christian nation; she had stolen it because Jews, everyone knew, controlled the world, including university boards who awarded academic prizes.

She only screamed when they pulled out a knife. When she arrived home, she had missed Shabbat dinner, but the blood on her clothes saved her from a lecture. Shabbat dinner was an institution: it was a constant, like the laws of motion or the fact that she could never, never tell anyone about what she was doing with Bridgette. The Roberts family rarely went to synagogue (only for Purim, Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur), but every Friday night they would all sit around the dinner table and her mother would light the candles and her father would make _kiddush_ and they would place a hand on each of their children's heads and pray that they would be like Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. (No one was like Ephraim and Menasseh, but it was only when Etty was at NYU that she wondered if she was the one who felt a pang of loss at that absence, not her parents; whether it was really loss at all.)

Etty Roberts had been brought up to believe that God was real, and that science was real, and that the laws of science were proof of God's existence. Etty Roberts did not pray, but she believed with her whole heart in her mother as she lit the candles, in her father as he made _motzi_ , in the sound of a whole community beating their breast for an alphabetical list of sins.

The next Shabbat, when she was home and safe and her clothes were bloodless, she felt itchy all over, like she did not quite belong. As her father recited the prayer to a melody he only half sung, she heard the boys in the alley, felt their boots in her ribs, smelled the comforting smell of bleached labs, and knew she could not be both.

Her Judaism had never clashed with her science, but her Jewishness had.

When presented with the choice, Etty Roberts chose the future over the past. (Her future, over her past.)

v.  
As Etty Roberts was preparing for her final exams as an undergraduate, Adolf Hitler declared the _Anschluss_. She came home to a house heavy with foreboding; everyone she saw seemed to be holding their breath. She still did not understand the Yiddish wireless reports her parents listened to more religiously than they'd ever been at _shul_ , nor the letters in handwriting she couldn't recognise: in Yiddish, in German, even a few in Hebrew.

(The only reason she knew the difference between the Hebrew and Yiddish was because Ruth had asked about it. They looked like the same incomprehensible language to her. Looking at the alphabet she did not know felt like mourning.)

Everyone knew that German Jews were registered, now. Everyone knew something was coming - something worse than the pogroms, worse than anyone could remember. Everyone knew but no one did anything because no one could - Debbie had asked if she could write to the President and Etty didn't need to know Yiddish to know what her mother muttered was uncomplimentary.

The Evian Conference was convened when Etty received her acceptance to MIT. The wireless was on in English, now, but she decided she had preferred when she couldn't understand what was being said: now she knew that no one cared, they were saying so in English, ringing their hands and saying someone should help the Jews, but it shouldn't be _them_.

She tried to tell herself that once she left for MIT, she wouldn't be Jewish anymore, but that just made her feel hollow and nauseous.

In September, Etty Roberts left Brooklyn, and Esther Roberts arrived in Massachusetts.

vi.  
Esther Roberts did not inquire into the location of the local synagogue, not even for Yom Kippur.

Esther Roberts did not hear of the Polish-German Jews dying in camps on the border, stateless, futureless.

Esther Roberts did hear of _Kristallnacht_. It was impossible not to. The _New York Times_ editorial made a ball of ice form in her stomach and her breakfast turn to ash in her mouth. The photograph of the synagogue on fire made her feel like she was going to vomit.

When she left New York she thought she had left Jewry behind, but it had followed her, screaming in terror from front-page headlines four columns wide. She pretended to be like her fellow students at the breakfast tables, exclaiming in horror as these things happened far away, to someone else, to hypothetical Jews they did not know. They could read the paper and still clean their plate of eggs and bacon; she stopped eating breakfast altogether. She tried to stop reading the paper, instead, but even when she did not have the _Times_ staring back at her, she couldn't swallow her jam toast. (She had tried bacon, once, when she arrived in Massachusetts; she did not understand the fuss.) It was still in the chatter all around her, and she eventually succumbed to reading the _Times_ to at least know the details they were reporting.

"The German Situation" was what they called it. By December, Jews had been banned from driving cars, operating businesses and using their bank accounts. They were required to live in specific buildings. She received letters from her parents updating her on what they heard, but those often came at the same time as the papers reported it, since post was getting more unreliable from Europe. When they asked about how her fast had been, she lied, saying it was easy and she barely had a headache; when they asked if she was safe, she did not know if answering yes was a lie. No one knew she was Jewish and she hadn't been attacked (neither had any of the Jewish students at MIT - the other Jewish students, she meant, the ones with names like Cohen or Ira), but her clothes were beginning to look baggy on her.

She wasn't sure what safety was - was it being told antisemitic things casually as if she were an insider who would agree? Was it her best friend turning to her during their work to muse idly why German Jews didn't just convert to Christianity? She was free from threats, but it didn't feel like safety.

She heard of the Madison Square Garden protests from a letter from Ruth, who had been there, but not from her father, who had been disapproving. Ruth had asked him to come, but he was convinced they would be arrested or shot or the government would decide times were ripe for a pogrom. For all the editorials, Henry Ford was still a lauded public figure. Father Coughlin was still on the airwaves, actively calling for antisemitic violence in the streets. Ruth had told their father that pogroms couldn't happen here, but he had replied that they had thought the same of Germany. Ruth hadn't asked after that, she wrote. Esther could see why.

Despite all the talk in newspapers of the plight of Jewry, of the need to get them out of Germany, of how deplorable Nazi actions were, the _St Louis_ was sent back. Almost a thousand Jews were sent back to Germany after begging for their lives. The morning it was reported, Esther heard someone (a Cohen? a Steinberg?) speak angrily about _those goyische hypocrites who don't give a shit about whether we live or die_ and it felt a little like belonging, even as she averted her eyes and hurried away with her toast.

Esther Roberts didn't know what safety was. She didn't know if she ever had.

vii.  
At the beginning of her second year at MIT, Britain declared war on Germany - not because Jews were given curfews and expelled from all German schools, but because Germany invaded Poland.

viii.  
As the world fell apart, Esther threw herself into her work, trying to drown out the Nazi advance with advances in her own doctorate. France fell. Esther made a breakthrough that completely changed her research. The Warsaw ghetto was sealed. Esther pulled an all-nighter, if only so she wouldn't hear the discussions or see the paper. A pogrom in Romania. A pogrom in Lithuania. Ten thousand Jewish deaths in Odessa. Esther knew she was too thin, knew she looked sickly, knew she couldn't continue like this but - well, she couldn't continue like this. The world could not continue like this.

Japan bombed Pearl Harbour. The US declared war on Japan. Germany declared war on the US. The US declared war on Germany.

Through it all, the laws of science remained constant. At least the pages of her doctorate kept expanding.

ix.  
When the _New York Times_ front page announced that Hitler planned to exterminate the Jews, Esther barely made it to the bathroom before vomiting up bile. She knelt on the tiles, the cold biting through her tights, and retched over the toilet bowl, gagging even when there was absolutely nothing left. She knelt until her legs had gone numb and she had run out of energy to retch, her head resting against the wall of the cubicle. She got up, her whole body trembling, and didn't bother to tell Jack where she was, just headed back to bed and held back the burn in her throat until the door closed and she wept. She couldn't pinpoint why she was crying - was it for the fact that two million Jews had been murdered already, and there was nothing slowing the Nazis down? Was it mourning the old country she had never known? Was it the sheer fucking terror that her entire people could be exterminated, as if they were pests, vermin to be controlled? Ruth's letter from years ago kept echoing in her head - her father saying we thought that about Germany, too. When she thought about it happening to her family - to her sisters, to her mother, to her father - she had to run to the bathroom again, heaving sobs as she hunched over porcelain.

She couldn't tell anyone. She couldn't even say anything to her best friend in this whole goddamned world because she wasn't Jewish. Esther Roberts, Definitely Not A Jew. Jack wasn't a bad person, but she'd heard enough casual antisemitism from him to know that he wouldn't understand.

When she emerged from her room two days later, she told Jack she'd had a sudden stomach flu. He joked that with the way her face was still swollen, maybe it was mumps. At least he had the decency not to comment when her attempt at a laugh sounded like anything but.

Her work went nowhere from then until the break over New Year's, as she spent hours wondering how the Nazis had made soap from the corpses of Warsaw Jews, imagining the MIT chemistry labs with bubbling beakers over bunsen burners and her dissected corpse laid out on a table, a magen david sewn above her breast to mark that she couldn't hide forever.

x.  
She went home and it was the first time she had seen New York in winter since she had left NYU. She usually stayed in Cambridge - it wasn't like there was a major religious holiday, after all, and she enjoyed the quiet on campus - but she felt like she was going to shatter, the weight of hiding snapping her bones and eating her alive. She longed for her mother's chicken soup in a way she never had before; she longed for Shabbat, for the ritual constants that made the world turn.

When she arrived home, her mother held her in an iron grip as she spoke loudly to no one in particular how terribly they'd been feeding her over there in Massachusetts. She smelled like home, like soap and rosemary and perfume, and Esther Roberts, age twenty-six, cried like she was in elementary school. Her mother stroked her hair, murmuring comforting nothings to her as she shed the skin she had worn for too long.

Before she returned to MIT, the break for the first time feeling too short, she took the smallest _hanukkiah_ they owned and a pair of candlesticks and packed them at the bottom of her suitcase. She was still Esther Roberts, Definitely Not a Jew, but if she didn't want to waste away she needed something to ground her. Lighting candles was an activity she could do in relative secrecy - unlike a _seder_ , or residing in a _sukkah_ or attending _Kol Nidre_ \- but it still felt like something.

Even at home, it felt like the ground was slipping out from under her when her parents got a letter returned to sender with a stamp that said, _Died in the course of the liquidation of the Jewish problem_. No one would tell her who they had addressed it to, but she knew the surname was her mother's maiden name.

xi.  
The day she first met with Anthony Partridge, the _New York Times_ ran a full-page advertisement about a rally to be held in Madison Square Garden. New reports of the atrocities had spurred community action at last, the reality of Europe more terrifying than the possibility of reprisals for speaking out against the government's continued inaction. She had been keeping her head afloat since she returned from New York, at least partly because the _Times_ had been silent on the murders since December, but figures like _six thousand deaths a day_ made swallowing impossible. She met Anthony Partridge on an empty stomach and willed it not to grumble as she stood next to Jack.

She had been pretending her work was a bubble where the war did not exist; she hadn't considered that the government would want her to use it for the war effort. Partridge - white, looked in his thirties, claimed he was the head of a whole team of scientists - said he had been keeping tabs on promising students at MIT and she and Jack had caught his eye. Before he would even tell them any more she and Jack had to sign non-disclosure agreements, and once they had she understood why: the public did not even know ODAR existed, let alone what it was doing. They would be working in a town purpose-built for ODAR, Partridge said; it wasn't on maps, and they could tell no one where they were for security purposes. They would have all the things they could need for day-to-day life as well as what seemed like an almost inexhaustible budget for scientific equipment, though. He told them both that there were non-denominational Protestant services on Sundays, but then turned to her and said,

"Sorry, but we don't have a rabbi, and the brass doesn't want to redirect resources unless there's a bigger demand."

Esther felt like someone had dropped ice cubes down her back as Jack turned to her and said, "You're Jewish?"

For a moment, her horror was mixed with confusion - how could they have known? But it was the government, of course they had known, and they probably had her Harvard application on file, and she had been involved in the Jewish community at NYU and they had presumably done a whole background check, seen the neighbourhood she lived in and the maiden name of her mother and of course they knew, of course she couldn't have hidden forever.

"Sorry, was that not - known information?" Partridge said, looking genuinely concerned at how much she had paled and Jack's reaction. "Esther Faigel Roberts - we've got it right, haven't we?"

"Yes," she said, swallowing and keeping her eyes on Partridge, not Jack.

"Look, I'm sorry about the rabbi thing - would that affect your decision to work with us?"

She thought of how much hiding felt like suffocating, she thought of the candlesticks at the bottom of her suitcase, she thought of the boys who had left a mottled artwork of bruising on her ribs, and she straightened her shoulders and said, "Not at all, sir."

 **A/N:**

I'll be honest, this fic came from a place of anger - I was angry that Ars Paradoxica had decided to make a Jewish character with an antisemitic comment about Hanukkah (from her supposed best friend!) and a line about name changing at Ellis Island. I was angry that Sally was so outraged about the Manhattan Project but she arrived before the USA had even officially confirmed the existence of factory-style death camps; she arrived before Chelmno was reopened to liquidate ghettos. It wasn't like the Shoah was over yet. She could have had some rage for the millions in Europe yet to die as well as the hundreds of thousands in Japan. I love Ars, so I wrote this fic. My main historical reference was _Were We Our Brothers' Keepers?: The Public Response of American Jews to the Holocaust, 1938–1944_ (1999) by Haskel Lookstein, but I've also studied the Holocaust at university level. Every attempt was made to be historically accurate except for when Esther received acceptance letters for universities, because I don't understand the US system and it wasn't important. Also, it was only after I finished the fic that I realised Esther had a roommate and worked in Atlantic City, presumably during undergrad. I considered changing the fic, dipped my toes into the hellhole research of finding what universities would admit women again, cried, and then left it as it is. In my defence, the majority of 1930s Jewish women who went to university commuted instead of living on campus.

Historical references (though NYT content is all paywalled, so I haven't linked it):

i. For info on universities systematically rejecting Jews, see "Getting In" by Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.  
iii. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 - defines Jewishness by blood, not religion (hence why Esther is super done with Jack's suggestion that they just convert later on); makes marriage and sex between Jews and non-Jews illegal.  
iv. Kiddush and motzi are specific blessings (Friday night blessing over wine and the blessing over bread respectively); references to Biblical figures is the Shabbat blessing over children (the first section is gender-specific, hence the split). On various occasions during the Yamim Noraim (Days of Awe), you say an alphabetical list of sins while beating your breast, called Vidui.  
v. The Anschluss was when Hitler invaded and then took over Austria. Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet, and even if Esther could read a siddur (prayer book), handwritten Hebrew looks completely different.  
vi. The NYT did indeed have a photograph of a burning synagogue accompanying its coverage of Kristallnacht (which was called Black Thursday at the time, but I felt it made more sense to call it Kristallnacht in narration). The Madison Square Garden protest referenced here is the one of 21 November 1938, not the more famous one in 1943. Father Coughlin was a Catholic priest who had a radio show that was virulently antisemitic from 1936-39 and led to a spate of violent attacks on New York Jews in early 1939. The St Louis was a ship with 930 Jewish refugees sent back to Germany by Cuba and the US.  
ix. NYT front page for 18 Dec 1942. All atrocities and figures mentioned were reported by the press around this time.  
x. Yes, that was a real return-to-sender stamp that existed, first appearing winter 1942/43.  
xi. The NYT ran the full-page ad on 26 Feb 1943. Faigel is a Yiddish name (it's Esther's grandma). (I know that Esther and Jack were recruited by Partridge in Spring 1943, but what's a few weeks between friends?)

you can find me on tumblr as facingthenorthwind.


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